Artist Wally Wood added to their number with Earthman, a character who appeared only once in Harvey Comics’ Unearthly Spectaculars 2 (Dec. 1966).
“One finds a bevy of tales in Unearthly Spectaculars 2,” observed comics blogger Rip Jagger. “These books were put together by Joe Simon and are host to many really excellent artistic outings, but you have to know to look. Perhaps the finest is Earthman by Wally Wood.”
In The Coming of Earthman, Wood gave us an amnesiac astronaut who found himself on some strange world without a memory but with the gravity-differential powers of a circa-1938 Superman. The green and orange remnants of his space suit become a default superhero costume.
After an initial encounter with scarlet-skinned Thark-like beings, Earthman tackles warriors flying along on pterosaurs and then interrupts the execution of an innocent primitive, wrecking a fort in the process.
Captured by the super-scientific dictator Noxus, the still-dazed Earthman becomes a pawn in the villain’s plan to rule the planet. Rebelling, he saves a beautiful girl from a collapsing castle, thwarts the would-be dictator and wanders away, never to be seen again.
Not an original idea, but that hardly mattered — it was always a pure pleasure to see Wood draw his clean-limbed supermen, so full of contained power.
“The lucky fan of the ’60s stumbled upon new Wood work everywhere, from (Gold Key’s) M.A.R.S. Patrol to stories in Warren’s Creepy and Eerie,” observed artist and writer Michael T. Gilbert. “Pick up Harvey’s Three Rocketeers, or one of their short-lived anthology titles, and you might stumble on Wood’s Earthman or Miracles, Inc. His backups, hidden away like perfect jewels, would often outshine the cover feature. Classic Wood art also popped up in Ballantine’s EC paperbacks.”
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